Site Mobile Navigation

A Hollywood Anachronism, Serving Stars but Never Gossip

Dmitri Dmitrov, left, the maître d'hôtel at the Tower Bar.Credit
Stephanie Diani for The New York Times

WEST HOLLYWOOD, Calif. — Jennifer Aniston is Table 24, a coveted perch with a view of the piano yet screened from prying eyes by a bank of Casablanca lilies. Anderson Cooper is Table 11, with its panoramic view across the dining room. Sean Penn is Table 20, except on those nights when a certain agent he’s at war with is in the house. A major studio executive who dines on successive nights with his daughter, wife and mistress is guided to cozy spots at Tables 21, 22 and 12.

Johnny Depp prefers a banquette by a window in the northwest corner. That’s him now, having supper with Mom and Dad.

Los Angeles is a vast city, but Hollywood is a small town, one whose inhabitants favor familiar watering holes. Perhaps the hottest among these now is the Tower Bar at the Sunset Tower Hotel.

Although the restaurant and the refurbished Sunset Boulevard building containing it belong to the New York hotelier Jeff Klein, who rescued the hotel when it was an Art Deco dump and refashioned it as a chic haven, anyone here knows that the person who runs the place is its maître d’hôtel.

That man is Dmitri Dmitrov, a 60-year-old Macedonian immigrant with Rudolph Valentino hair, a Chiclet smile, an Eastern European accent theatrical enough to seem invented and a manner so ostentatiously courteous it conjures up a Slavic geisha scripted by Mel Brooks. Yet when Mr. Dmitrov ducks his head, bowing solicitously as he smilingly conducts guests to tables in a softly lighted room with framed photographs of vaudeville-era nobodies, his performance masks a subtle and steely power.

In a town where gossip is the coin of the realm, Mr. Dmitrov is a sphinxlike figure who knows everything and says nothing. And, like Erich von Stroheim in “Sunset Boulevard,” his loyalty to his fragile industry charges is fierce and absolute.

“He creates this little pocket of safety,” said Ms. Aniston, a Tower Bar regular, “a haven where you know you’re not getting sold out by the waiter, a patron or the valet guy.”

Nobody gets a table at the Tower Bar without a nod from Mr. Dmitrov. Nobody wanders in on those nights when famous players are parked at almost every table and secures a seat by slipping him a bribe. Nobody breaks the archly civilized tone Mr. Klein has set for his hotel by pulling out an iPhone and trying to take a picture.

And “nobody is shooting up or smoking pot in the lobby” as long as Mr. Dmitrov is in charge, Mr. Klein said.

“Dmitri is part fantasy, a throwback,” said Anjelica Huston, the Oscar-winning actress. “He claps his hands in joy at the sight of you. He practically dances you to your table. He makes you feel like he’s been waiting for you the better part of a year.”

It was Mr. Dmitrov’s ability to manage both butterfly and killer egos that inspired Brad Grey, the chairman and chief executive of Paramount, to request that Mr. Klein lend him Mr. Dmitrov to help manage his all-star wedding to Cassandra Huysentruyt last spring. “He has this encyclopedia of who’s who in his head and an ability almost of casting where they belong,” Mr. Grey said.

Mr. Dmitrov explains his working methods simply. “The most important thing is placing yourself in service position, a gentle touch, a humble touch,” said the maître d’, whose grasp of English grammar remains casual even after decades in the United States. “The ultimate is when I please somebody like Sean Penn or Johnny Depp, Nancy Reagan or Betsy Bloomingdale,” he said. “I am student of these people. I am deep in their achievements because, at the end of the day, it’s not about me.”

That it is, in fact, largely about Mr. Dmitrov (starting at 5:15 each evening) is immediately evident to any visitor to the Tower Bar.

Photo

As the maître d' of the Tower Bar, Dmitri Dmitrov, caters to stars and film executives, including Johnny Depp, Sherry Lansing, Sean Penn and Jennifer Aniston.Credit
Stephanie Diani for The New York Times

In the six years since Mr. Klein, following a suggestion from the designer Tom Ford, rescued Mr. Dmitrov from a fading career at drearily elegant places like a local Russian restaurant that featured a harpist, ice swans and a caviar menu, he has become a Hollywood institution. And there is something cinematic in his unexpected second act.

Having spent decades in the service industry, starting as a teenage busboy in 1960s London and later working stints at a Ritz-Carlton in Canada and a variety of swell Los Angeles dining spots, Mr. Dmitrov “was at a stage in his career when he could not get arrested in this town,” Mr. Klein said, when Mr. Ford first recommended him.

“I hate for anyone to tell me what to do,” the hotelier explained, and yet once he encountered Mr. Dmitrov’s anachronistic manner, he immediately saw that his were just the skills for a restaurant looking to counter the prevalent style of service that favors waiters who wear earpieces and greet customers by their first name.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

There are no first names at the Tower Bar. The longtime film executive Sherry Lansing is invariably Ms. Lansing. The agent Bryan Lourd is Mr. Lourd.

“I was raised with hard work and classic French service,” Mr. Dmitrov said, “but also I read Hollywood Reporter and Variety every morning like a bible.”

Because Mr. Dmitrov carries around in his head a Venn diagram of the city’s seldom intersecting social, political and professional elites, he can configure a room so agents with competing clients are never seated within earshot of one another, socialites who do not speak are placed at opposite ends of the room, and Kevin Huvane, the powerful boss of the Creative Artists Agency, is never mistaken for his brother, Stephen, a publicist.

“I’d heard about him before he went to Sunset Tower, the hand thing, the way he bends, so funny,” said Ms. Bloomingdale, the socialite and Reagan intimate who celebrated her 85th birthday at the Tower Bar this month. “You see immediately why he’s so special, because they don’t make them like that anymore.”

Perhaps they never did. Like the “Millionaire Matchmaker” but with better manners, Mr. Dmitrov is as prone to ensure that the right people meet one another as he is to keep the wrong people apart.

“The last time I was there, he introduced me to the man who designs Balenciaga,” Ms. Bloomingdale said, referring to the French designer Nicolas Ghesquière. “Dmitri said, ‘You must meet him.’ Normally, no one could just introduce you, but he can.” (By coincidence, she was wearing a Balenciaga outfit that day.) “He makes it like a club,” she added.

Even in the long-ago days before the emergence of a gossip machine with an insatiable maw, Hollywood folks favored dining spots that functioned like the private clubs often closed to many of them. Nostalgia for those places infuses the Tower Bar, kept alive in the clubby décor but also in Mr. Dmitrov’s nightly performance, with its echoes of other Hollywood self-inventions, people like Hershel Geguzin, better remembered as the legendary restaurateur Mike Romanoff.

“The Tower Bar is kind of like Chasen’s was,” said Richard Roth, a producer of “The Way We Were.” “At Chasen’s, you had your table, Alfred Hitchcock had his table, Ronald Reagan had his table, Lew Wasserman had his.”

At the Tower Bar, you have your table, and if you are Ms. Huston or Ms. Aniston or Bill Murray, you also have your own white linen napkin embroidered with your name in cursive chocolate-brown script. If you are Michael Govan, the director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, or Mr. Grey, the Paramount executive, you have your favorite house-baked chocolate chip cookies delivered by Mr. Dmitrov to your table along with dessert.

“In a city that doesn’t have the same kind of intense social life that New York has, there was always a restaurant life,” Mr. Roth said. “Hollywood people would go to Morton’s or the Ivy or Spago, and it was a theatrical event, like Elaine’s in its heyday. Hollywood people are remarkably susceptible to fantasy. The same people that make fantasy want it and need it.”

And Mr. Dmitrov obliges with a performance Ms. Huston was not alone in suggesting feels like an extended riff on all the major-domos in all the 1930s Hollywood films.

“He’s the guy the customer would have imagined existed” outside the movies, Mr. Grey said. “You think that guy was always there,” ushering Ava Gardner to join Frank Sinatra at his favorite booth. “But that guy may very well not have existed outside the cinema.”

A version of this article appears in print on August 21, 2011, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Hollywood Throwback, Serving Stars but Never Dishing Gossip. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe